IT WASN’T A LOVE STORY

It wasn’t a Love Story was the game I made in the second group project at CGL. The prerequisite of the game was that it had to be an experimental game and that it followed the theme: the Three Wise Monkeys.

With this premise, we came out with the idea of making an investigation game in which the player could not see, hear or interact with the pieces of evidence directly. To do so, he would have to get rid of all the interferences that were around the murder scene and, with a video editing tool – like, process all the corrupted pieces of information, resulting in a video file that he then has to put in order. After that, the result should be a video of the murder scene but, depending on how the player orders the files, there could be multiple endings.

To add an extra experimental feature, the whole game was controlled using a synthesizer controller. This made the user interaction be another challenge, apart from the game itself.

We divided the game in different puzzles, being the first one a hidden shadow puzzle, where the player had to move the light and the camera to get the correct silhouettes, made by some abstract sculptures, on the wall. Then the player would have to find and collect some videos and sounds which were spread all over the room, having to get rid of the glitches that hid them first. After all this, the player would have the murder scene in hos UI, so he would have to put it in order and play the preview. We decided to leave the ending open for the player to make the final guess.

About the programming, the game was made in Unity, with a special plugin for the controller. It was quite a simple game to make, however, it was a challenge to work with multiple cameras and a complex UI system.